It is known that a significant amount of unauthorised material may be found on the Internet, which often causes damage to the reputation of, for example, an individual, company, brand or product. Content found on the Internet can often be unauthorised, stolen or misappropriated, degrading, illegal, malicious, damaging, libellous, hurtful, defamatory, outdated or suspended, fraudulent, extrajudicial, thereby bestowing a complete misrepresentation of the individual, company, brand or product.
Once a new website has been created, or content/material has been posted on an existing website, a search engine may regularly visit this site and index its content and make this new content/material searchable from a web search engine. A web search engine makes no allowance for the fact the content/material uploaded to a website is true or damaging or illegal. Consequently, the web search engine just indexes the content/material and makes it searchable for any future user who types in a word or phrase associated with the website the content/material is present on.
An example of this potential problem that may be caused to an individual, company, brand or product would be if unauthorised material (e.g. photos, video, music, etc.) was uploaded to a social network website, or any other type of website. Within a short period of time, this material could go ‘viral’ and, thus, be available to be downloaded by anyone searching for it. If an individual felt that the material was damaging, hurtful or included family members, for example, who did not want to be in the public eye, the individual could ask to have the material removed. This is common practice and would require some form of legal action against the hosting websites. In most instances, reasonable websites will take the material down promptly.
However, a potential problem with such unreasonable, damaging content/material may be that in some cases the content/material could have been moved to jurisdictions where it is more difficult to have it removed.
Therefore, a need exists to provide protection for individuals, companies, products, and the like, in order to limit any damage created through, for example, unauthorised material on the Internet.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via ‘natural’ (without a tariff being imposed) search results. Such natural search results are often referred to as ‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’ search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page) and more frequently that a site appears in a search result list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. Page rankings are largely based on the degree of surfer interest and traffic flow, page impressions, freshness, search term density, links in and out, frequency of updates, age of page and other factors.
One disadvantage of generic SEO is that it relies on the search engine robots ‘finding’ the websites, indexing them and then positioning them on the search engine page ranking. Typical search engine optimisation (SEO) focuses on creation and manipulation of content to existing or new websites, both overtly and covertly. These changes make the website more visible to the search engine robots and, therefore, they are indexed with specific keywords associated with the website. It is known that SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
As effective SEO schemes may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. Optimizing a website to improve its rating on website searching typically involves editing its content and hyper-text mark-up language (HTML) and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. The term ‘search engine friendly’ is also often used to describe website designs, content management systems, videos, images, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.
In some scenarios, the acronym ‘SFOs’ may also refer to ‘search engine optimizers’, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign.
Most users of search engines cease reviewing web-site content at the first or second page. One recent tactic for the use of SFOs is website promotion, in order to bring more visitors to specific websites. In recent years, website promotion, say through SEO, has also been used in the area of on-line product promotion, for example to promote new or existing products and to improve product exposure of a particular product in a country, region or on a specific search engine. Alternative techniques to SEO are also used for website promotion, such as web content development and search engine submission, in order to increase (search) traffic to a site.
One problem with SEO, for example in the context of website promotion, is that SEO requires access to each and every website in order for certain names, terms or expressions to be promoted. Thus, access to each of these websites is required in order to make and enforce the necessary/desired website changes.
Thus, a need exists for at least an apparatus (such as a processor engine/integrated circuit) and method promoting a web-site in a search process, and in particular for a scalable computer-implemented method of affecting a website's (URL) position on a search engine(s) page ranking.
It is also known that the Internet is a very dynamic tool, and that certain words or phrases can become popular relatively quickly. Popularity of certain words or phrases can be known as ‘trending’ on social network or other websites. Search engines are able to use these ‘trends’ and provide prompts for what may be currently the most popular search terms. An example of this would be to use a search engine and start typing the word “OLYMPICS”. In this example, as the first two characters are typed, a prompt may be created for the most popular search terms prefixed with OL. In this example, Olympics is the third prompt, second to pop stars and celebrities who are currently (today) searched for more than the Olympics.
Therefore, a need also exists to be able to influence an association created between search terms and the website(s) visited.